It’s been a hunker-down week for Clint Eastwood‘s two Iwo Jima films. Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20) was screened for a tight little group yesterday, but if any press people were invited I wasn’t told about it. (Not that I made a big deal about finding out.) The first Left Coast journo showing apparently won’t be happening until next week. And Warner Bros., apparently, continued to explore and negotiate and re-examine all over again what date will be best for the release of Letters From Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s Japanese-soldier war film intended to complement Flags. Dither, dither, dither.

What an amazing, exciting, profitable thing all around: Peter Jackson is partnering with Microsoft to create at least two Xbox 360 video games, one of which will be based on Jackson’s upcoming Halo, under the aegis of a new outfit called Wingnut Interactive. I’m getting the chills just thinking about it. Jackson and close partners Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens will dream up the particulars together. Think of the joy, the jazz…the cultural adrenalin that will be felt from these games. Not to mention the truckloads of money to be earned.
I’m saying, in other words, that Jackson is perhaps better attuned or suited to the video-game creator mentality than that of a genuinely intriguing filmmaker, which is to say someone with an ability and/or willingness to hold back at times, to occasionally understate, to not always push the visual pizazz at level 10. Jackson always creates at an extremely showoffy, unsophisticated level, and I think this approach is more in synch with what gamers are looking for than what people who appreciate the sometimes more delicate chemistry that goes into making a truly fine film.Water always finds its own level, and I think Jackson has just found — accepted — his.

“There has never been anything quite like Asger Leth‘s Ghosts of Cite Soleil,” Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has written. “It’s amazing it even exists and that the director is still alive. Rough as can be in both content and style, Ghosts will be welcome everywhere tough, provocative docus are shown.”

This Matt Damon-Jimmy Kimmel confrontation happened a week or so ago. What’s wrong with it, of course, is that it’s an act. It would have been brilliant — historic — if Damon had really gotten angry and stormed off. It would have been something real and rude instead of another damn mock- ironic put-on. Everything is on this level these days — on talk shows, SNL, sitcoms. Nothing laid on the line, every statement in “quotes.”

I need to be honest and admit something, which is that I’m not particularly enthused about watching a forthcoming F/X TV series called 4 oz., as in one quarter of a pound, which is the weight of a surgically severed penis. I don’t think this one holds great interest for me. 21 Grams — the weight of a human soul — worked as a title but not this…sorry. Ryan Murphy‘s forthcoming series is about a married sportswriter who decides to become a woman…terrific. I haven’t been permitted to see Murphy’s Running With Scissors (Columbia, 10.27), but as far as I know it’s only about verbal (as opposed to surgical) slicings.

I don’t know how many people are making personal /quirky New York Film Film Festival video diaries, but Jamie Stuart is probably better at this sort of thing than anyone else. He really has a handle on something here — the precisely timed cutting style, the grungy lonely-guy narration…he’s really the best. He just needs to do more sit-ups and eat more fruit and fewer cheeseburgers. And everything loads way too slowly on the site — it’s like watching paint dry. Stuarts’s first NYFF encounter is with the Little Chidren team — Todd Field, Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Noah Emmerich, etc.

“It’s not a ghost town yet, but unless they rent some of those offices and start to use the sound studios, it’s not hard to envision tumbleweeds and coyotes moving in.” — a Paramount “source” speaking to Radar Online‘s Jeff Bercovici about the low activity and population levels on the Paramount Pictures lot.

If you could pick any actor or filmmaker to meet in a boxing ring, who would it be? Ten rounds, no holding or hitting below the belt…but you can slug away all you want. Or maybe you’d rather face down a film critic or a columnist? I’ve fantasized from time to time about beating up tech-support outsource guys from India, but I really don’t like slugging people. I haven’t been in a fistfight since the seventh grade.

I’m no longer the only guy advocating the Best Actress candidacy of Factory Girl‘s Sienna Miller, and breathing easier. Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, another “Envelope” forecaster, has put Miller on his own list. I’m not sure, though, if he’s actually seen her in Factory Girl or if he’s just riding the tailwind.

To listen to N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, Forrest Whitaker‘s Last King of Scotland stock has just dropped a couple of points. And yet New Yorker critic David Denby is deeply enamored, so maybe it all balances out.
Dargis has described Whitaker’s General Idi Amin as a character who “changes moods on a dime depending on the gas percolating in his bowels or the threats on his person, real and imagined. It’s a role rich in gristle and blood, and Mr. Whitaker makes the most of it, even if the performance and the film’s essential conception of Amin never push deep or hard enough. This actor can play devious, [but] what you need in a film about a man who fed the corpses of his victims to the crocodiles is something more, something hateful and vile.”
Denby, on other hand, says that “Whitaker, [giving] the performance of a lifetime, makes General Amin a charismatic madman. Whitaker has done some surpassingly gentle and rueful work in the past, but for this role he has transformed himself — he’s either sprawled in a stupor or alarmingly mobile, throwing his big body around the room as if it weighed nothing. His laugh is enormous, and his arms are like grappling hooks.
“This dictator has a terrifying affability: like many sociopaths, he can be surprisingly empathic. He figures out what people want, but, once they have received his generosity, he believes that they belong to him. Any check on his desires sends him into a rage, and, as Whitaker takes off into astonishing tirades, one eye opens wide, and the other droops viciously — even his vision is schizoid.”

TMZ.com is reporting that NBC’s Law & Order series “will air an episode in November featuring Chevy Chase as ‘a television celebrity who is pulled over for drunk driving while wearing blood-soaked clothes, and whose religious prejudice comes out after his arrest.’ I can hear Chase saying to the arresting officer, “The Irish Catholics are the cause of all the alcoholism in the world! Wait…are you an Irish Catholic?”